Does 'World War Z' Have A Hidden Pro-North Korean Message?

Brad Pitt and Marc Forster's World War Z is undoubtedly a success given the state the movie was in some 6 months ago. Working on a huge budget, the zombie apocalypse movie was shaping up to be one of the biggest flops in cinematic history with murmurings of re-shoots, changed endings and discontent leaking from the set on a weekly basis.

According to a report in the New York Magazine's Vulture section, relations between Pitt and Forster became so fraught that the pair stopped speaking to each other altogether. Things apparently got so bad that when Forster had notes on a scene for Pitt, they had to be relayed through an intermediary.

Ironically, Pitt - whose company produced World War Z - fought for Forster to be given the director's chair on the $170 million budget movie. The studio was perhaps understandably wary given his only other big-budget effort was Quantum of Solace, the rather underwhelming 2008 James Bond movie.

Anyway, forget all that, because the guys managed to pull it together and release World War Z to a wave of strong reviews and big box-office numbers. The film images a world overrun by a zombie pandemic which leads to a new global power structure, though is there more to this flick than meets the eye? It sure looks like a fairly standard if entertaining addition to the tried and tested zombie genre, though several commentators suggest it comes equipped with a hidden message.

The Los Angeles Times' Steven Zeitchik wrote: "In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a wall is a heavily fraught symbol. But here it turns into an instrument of peace?"

It's certainly an interesting line of thinking and adds a new dimension to the discerning cinemagoer who want to attach some deeper meanings to the blockbuster zombie flick. The film opened last weekend in North America to a better than expected $66.4 million and plans for a sequel are currently underway.

World War Z is loosely based on Max Brooks' 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, itself modelled on Studs Terkel's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. Pitt's company Plan B was aggressive in securing the rights to the novel - bidding $1 million more than rival bidder Leonardo DiCaprio - though getting it onto the screen has been an exhausting and hazardous process.

Watch the World War Z trailer:

Studio Paramount indirectly admitted it wasn't happy with the film following the end of the first shoot. "The studio is cultivating multiple options," explained one production insider, "One is to try scrapping [the ending] and trying something different: They want to construct an entirely new ending to the movie. The other is to try salvaging it, because decent action can be elevated, and even sh*tty action can be saved. This is not an unmitigated disaster; it is salvageable." One of those options manifested itself in the form of Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof, who was brought in to watch the movie and make suggestions. Unfortunately for Paramount, Forster and Pitt, he said the script needed months of work - which he could not provide. Lindelof eventually agreed to work with his former colleague Drew Goddard for the better part of a month while Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) worked on rewrites.

Whatever those guys did appeared to work and Pitt's World War Z went from disaster, to salvageable, to a pretty decent zombie flick.

The debate behind its apparent hidden message could be fuelled when the film opens in Israel on July 11, 2013.